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Social networking can be a business’s best friend or its worst nightmare! With regards to consumer interaction and feedback, social networking pages like Facebook and MySpace are an open plethora of customer interaction. Herein lays the fundamental turning point. It’s one situation to have a consumer not necessarily like your product or to have had an unsavory experience. It is quite another to have them post that experience online for your entire consumer base to see! Not to fret, as you can turn any negative feedback into a positive consumer experience and even a glowing testimonial.

Say you sold software to a client and the software wound up being ineffectual or a bad copy and instead of the customer calling you to try and resolve the issue they decided to post a status update on Facebook regarding the actual software and purchasing experience with negative connotations while vowing to never purchase again. What would you do? Would you delete the comment? Do you have a protocol in place to handle these sorts of unfortunate situations?

The only thing you should and can do in a matter such as this is respond. You cannot act as though you didn’t see the complaint and if you delete it before responding you look guilty. So, to turn this negative feedback into a positive experience you need to get in direct contact with the client and generate an appropriate response to the posting.

See, people feel personally attacked when they buy something and there is an error of some sort. So in order to express their frustrations they may post the experience and create some unwarranted attention for your company/brand. Although negative, exposure is exposure and can be leveraged. Just take WalMart’s latest news into account. A very socially unconscious statement brought them unwanted attention and their stock actually rose!

Make a comment on your page reflecting the issue and post it to all of your networking pages. You need to do this while simultaneously contacting the client. Do what is necessary to eradicate the error and then re-post your resolution. Not only will your client and his/her network have taken major notice, the viral extension will have brought you a notable amount of brand awareness. Especially, to the fact that you are aware of your brands identity and that you will not allow your clients to be dissatisfied. Social resolutions bring humanness to an otherwise “faceless” company profile and the direct interaction and accountability will do wonders for your traffic.